This application and its disclosure generally relate to the field of taking X-ray images, in particular, the images of a person's spine using X-ray technology.
Various kinds of illnesses can be traced to deformations in the spines of patients. In order to obtain a prognosis for such illnesses, for many years standard practice has been to obtain images of the spines of patients and the visually inspect these images and review the patients' medical histories. Typically, deformations of the spine can be a result of a congenital condition, or can result from a severe trauma suffered during an automotive accident, a fall, a physical altercation, etc. It is a directive of the American Medical Association (AMA) that an evaluator must assess spinal segments for abnormal motion during a routine evaluation of spine. In addition, the AMA publishes data mandating a specific protocol of quantification and ranges of such evaluation. Unfortunately, until now there was very little practice of quantitative analysis from such images due to technical difficulties and distortions during X-ray taking procedures, as also noted by the AMA. Therefore a physician had to rely on anecdotal evidence and his years of experience to make a reasonably accurate prognosis, or quantifications. X-rays have been used for more than a hundred years for generating images showing human anatomical structures, e.g., the components of the spinal column. However, since existing systems for this purpose have many disadvantages in generating accurate X-rays for purposes of generating intelligible quantification reports from the X-rays images, it became a time consuming and erroneous process subjected to a number of human errors making the end result, i.e., the quantification report, highly inaccurate.
In an earlier application by the present inventor (i.e., U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/881,411) an X-ray system is disclosed for capturing X-ray images of a portion of a patient's spine, the images including an L-shaped target of known dimensions which is attached to the patient's body. The X-rays are produced with the image of the target and analyzed using the image of the target as scaling indicator and a process is discussed for automatically, or semi-automatically analyzing the X-ray images and generating quantification data that assists a doctor in establishing of a diagnosis and a prognosis of the patient.
While the system described in the earlier application works well and provides a great improvement in the state of the art, it still has some shortcomings. One of them is that it is specific only to the newer X-ray systems (such as the ones made by GE) and may not work for others older systems. A further disadvantage is that it does not address reliably the problems associated with errors and uncertainties associated with magnitude of systems generators which generate variations of intensities of energy produced, and therefore making the target non-visible in the image created.